JetAge

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Russia’s Hacking U.S. Networks the Next Sputnik?

After WWII,
we got German rocket scientists – especially Von Braun – and the Russians got
some too. This was latter half of the
1940’s and early 1950’s – which was also the start of the Cold War.

A new
reality became apparent to anyone who followed current events: The Russians
were not going to give up control of the land they had taken during the war –
especially Eastern Germany, and the agreement over how Berlin would be divided
and operated became meaningless.
(Churchill may have seen this coming.)

So, we put
our German rocket scientists, along with our on scientists, to work to develop
a V2-like missile for the U.S. to fight the new enemy just as the Germans did
to attack England. Russia did too. However, Russia went further – much further –
into uncharted development the likes of which few if any had ever considered.

A little more
history here (Russia history):

While Russia
may have come into the twentieth century one of the more backward countries in
Europe and Asia, Russians are not a backward people. Some very intelligent genes course through
their veins, and while they may have selected a economic/governmental system
that was doomed to fail – including their latest one – there are some very
smart techies doing innovative “stuff” even as I post this blog. Russia proves the saying “Absolute power
corrupts absolutely”. Google up living
in Russia if you don’t believe me.

Anyway, back
to my comparing this recent hacking by the Russians to Sputnik. This could have as big an impact as Sputnik
did on science. When Russia launch
Sputnik in 1957, and it started flying over the U.S. and any red-blooded American
could see it or here it beeps, it scared the hell out of a lot of people.

And what did
this lead to? The race to the moon, NASA,
all manner of satellites such as GPS, weather, and those only the CIA knows
about, and the current space station.

Given this
past history of innovative development of new technologies, might the Russians’
hacking follow a similar path that came after Sputnik? Is there another young Lev Sergeyevich
Termen, or Léon Theremin as he is known in the United States, coming up with
some new spying technology that we not even grasp or understand as has happen
in the past? We can only watch and
wonder.

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Email to Bill O’Reilly – Really?

After
watching a Bill O’Reilly show, I thought about emailing him to question his
comments on Hillary’s email fiasco, but after sobering up, thought wiser of it.

I agreed
with the big “O” that Hillary’s use of her email while Sec. of State was not
only irresponsible and negligence, but could – and probably - put national security in jeopardy. Where I found Mr. No Spin wanting in his
criticism was not commenting on Trump doing the same thing.

True, Trump
is waging an unprecedented campaign for the Presidency, but he is following a
trail already blazed by Hillary in his constant and excessive use of the
internet and social media such as Twitter.
And, his actions seem to send a signal that he will continue to do so –
even as he is being informed on U.S. government policy.

Major
candidates are briefed about ongoing policy so they will not be totally
ignorant of what is going on should they be elected President. Will Trump keep that info out of his
tweets. Yea, right. He has already shown he is politically incorrect
in the use of the internet, and while this may, or may not, be helping his unconventional
campaign, what happens when he starting getting sensitive information.

And who
among us really believe he will stop it should he get elected. Hillary didn’t after becoming Sec. of State. She was probably doing it when she was a
senator and had access to sensitive information. Who knows, given Trump’s current stumbles and
fumbles in using the internet, he may pull a “Hillary” before the November vote
comes around.

But no
mention of this from Bill who was so distraught over Hillary, and I was going
to bring that to his attention.

I didn’t do
the email because the sheer chance O’Reilly might select mine for publication
on his show. He would flash up my name
and hometown, and after contemplating that for a while, I decided not to it,
and blog it instead.

It wasn’t so
much my friends teasing me or even the hometown news featuring me in some story
as making it to the “big time” on O’Reilly as other nightmares that might
ensue. I hear and read stories of people
doing something similar to what I just described and becoming the target of
hate mail, telephone calls, and even threats against their life and family, and
then there’s the threat of hackers coming after me.
That’s why I did not send any email to the Big O.

Another
noteworthy point I would have included in the email to O’Reilly was what is
going to happen when Hillary becomes President.
When Hillary is elected and takes office, the clock starts ticking. The Republican Congress will open an
investigation into her misused emails, and just like the Benghazi witch hunt,
it will go on forever. Will they find any
impeachable offenses? This is why her selection
of VP as a running mate is more significant than usual.

Friday, April 15, 2016

The Self in Self-Driving Cars

The Rand Corporation
had a post referenced in the science news aggregator RealClearScience about self-driving
cars which is a subject that greatly interest me. Rand questioned what is the current state of
the whole situation, and I have to agree with them – as far as they go. The major point of the Rand article was that
even if self-driving cars where tested for way more miles than they have
currently run, it still would not be enough to determine their safety on the
road compared with human driven cars.

One major
subject not being mentioned about self-driving transportation is that it has
already existed for hundreds of years.
It was called the horse. All
kinds of stories exist of drunks or just overly drowsy riders going out and
getting in a carriage or “back in the saddle” and being safely transported
home. And why? Because the horse knew the way home and was
neither drunk or asleep.

Also – and this
is the key to the self-driving car discussion – the horse did not use the
riders form of intelligence to get home safely.
It used its own (horse sense?) – so too should self-driving cars. And while we are on the subject of going from
horse to automobile form of transportation, infrastructure had to change when
we went from one form to the other. This
has been true all through history: gas
lighting to electricity, sailing ships to steam, letter writing communication
to telegraph to telephone to radio and TV, and let’s not forget the Internet. So too does this need to happen when going to
self-driving cars. I would think a group
like the Rand Corporation should lead the way instead of describing what is
wrong.

Self-driving
cars should not try to observe the road the same way a human does. Trying to scan road markings, the general
direction of the blacktop, gutters, curbs, or even road signs meant for humans
is a failure waiting to happen, as the Rand posting so aptly describes.

Electrical
broadcasting transponders describing the local road would be the best, but that
requires power, so a passive transponder with a description of the immediate
roadway which the self-driving car would scan to read would probably work
better. Communicate with the car’s
programming (AI?) in a way it could more effectively use.

Self-driving
cars will have to continue to scan the road ahead as they do now for unexpected
or unforeseen obstructions, pedestrians, and no telling what else, but
comparing what it scans with what is being told should be there would be better
than what it is trying to do now.

Have
self-driving cars communicate with each other would help a lot. They could send current velocity, trajectory,
and other info so the car’s program knows what is going on better than trying
to scan another moving vehicle. Importantly,
this should include communicated information from non-self-driving cars, also.

Another significant
development for self-driving cars would be communication between traffic
devices, such as red lights at intersections.
Don’t scan the traffic signal to determine its color. Just have the red light communicate directly
with the self-driving car. If this was
developed the red light could communicate with self-driving cars at greater
distances so that they need not stop at the intersection because the red light
could send a message that if the self-driving car would slow or speed up a
5-miles an hour, by the time they got to the intersection, they could pass
through without stopping.

Of course,
that would not happen at a heavily congested intersection but a traffic signal
communicating with all approaching vehicles would change everything, and
hopefully reduce a lot of congestion.
Once again, new infrastructure may include new – and as yet unthought-of
– traffic devices.

The eight
hundred pound gorilla in this new technology is self-driving trucks. The development of the interstate highway
system changed how we transport goods and supply ourselves, and to not take
this into consideration when discussing self-driving vehicles leaves it grievously
wanting. I could really see this if
self-driving trucks were restricted to the interstate highway system with large
parking places at on and off raps. Human
drivers would take them to their destination on our local roads.

A test track will all these infrastructure
changes mentioned above would go a long way in proving self-driving vehicles
are the future of transportation.
Development of self-driving vehicles trying to copy human perception of
the road has no future – at least not until artificial intelligence catches up with
that of humans. And that’s a subject for
a whole different posting.

Wednesday, April 13, 2016

The Most Astounding Fact About the Universe

An
interesting article in Forbes asked the question: What Is The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe? The answer by a noted astrophysicist, author,
and blogger Ethan Siegel was “that it exists in such a way that it can be
understood at all”. To me, the most
amazing fact about the universe is that most of it missing – at least from our
point of view. As he noted in his post,
science tells us what we know, but what to me is also very important about
science is that it tells us what we don’t know.

And for what
we can see and measure in the universe – repeatedly by many observers – most of
it cannot be seen. Indirectly measured but
unseen. It is as if we have come full
circle to where we were several thousand years ago when the prevailing theory
of the universe was that the earth was the center and everything in the
universe revolved around us. We could
see, measure, and note with only the naked eye what was going on in the sky
above us, but concocted religious/mythical theories to explain it. That religious connection proved to be a sticky
problem when better observations and calculations where later developed.

Like now,
the ancient math back then was accurate. Several different civilizations around the
earth knew when and where a heavenly body would rise and set, but couldn’t
explain why. Built 5,000 years ago,
Stonehenge is still accurate today. We
could even track and predict those five stars that seem to wander the heavens –
what would later become known as planets – but once again, we could not explain
why.

The theory
of Dark Matter and Dark Energy may explain what we are seeing, and the theory
goes that dark matter is everywhere. But
a recent MIT observation could not find any evidence of dark matter within our
own solar system (So long ago, I can’t find it on the Internet.), however it was
confirmed later by two Russia astronomers in the summer of 2013. Soooo, where’s our dark matter? These observations sort of begs the question
of the dark matter theory. Currently,
according to the theory, the only way we can see dark matter in our own solar
system is to be standing still while it passes by several light years away from
our observation.

As for
proving astronomical theories locally, in the late 50’s astronomers were able
to solve a problem with observations of Mercury’s orbit and Newton's law of
universal gravitation using Einstein’s special relativity theory of gravity and
wrapped space. However, there is still a
major unknown in trying to combine special relativity and particle physics, but
that’s a subject for an entirely different post.

At any rate,
looking back at how wrong those earth centric theories of the universe were,
they at least got the moon right. It
does circle the earth. Let us hope that
our theories of the missing universe have a higher percentage of accuracy, but
since most of the universe is missing, and that fact alone could affect what is
really going on, makes it the most amazing fact about the universe.

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Our Two/Four Brains

An
interesting post popped up at a site named Think,
a Case Western Reserve University site in Cleveland, Ohio, of all places. It is about how we have two brains, and how
these two brains affect our religious belief.
Brains and religious belief: who could ask for a more blog worthy post?

The article
states that we have two brains: analytical and empathy. Then it goes into great detail about how that
affects peoples’ switching between the two brains to come up with their
religious philosophy.

This brought
up my problem with those Christians who desperately need a factual basis for
their belief in God. Of the three major
Middle Easter based religious, Christian, Judaism, and Muslim, Christianity is
the only one whose founder, Jesus Christ, was martyred because of religious
intolerance – and yet, no one will past judgement on you quicker than a
Christian.

Anyway, the
article goes on and on about the problem people have going between their
analytical brain and empathic brain trying to resolve their religious
belief.

As for my
beliefs here goes: Belief in science is
a matter of fact, it can be proven or disproven. Belief in God is a matter of faith, it can
neither be proven nor disproven. There can be no facts in faith. If so, then it is no longer faith. It is something else entirely.

To me that
is the beauty of belief in God: One of
our greatest blessings is understanding the universe around us. It is one of God’s greatest gifts. However, you cannot use the gift to know the
Giver. For that, you can only have faith.

It is as if
the whole world was blind and no creature on this planet could see. And God gave humans a set of eyewear glasses
with which they could see, and with it the blessing that everything we could
see we could come to know and understand.
And not only that, we could see how to grind glass so we could see even
further into the universe or lens to see the smallest of objects on earth, and
the promise held: everything we could see we could come to know and understand. However, no matter how far into the universe
we could see or microscopic an object we could see, we could never see
God. To do that we must take off the glasses,
go blind again, and see God through faith – only.

Enough about
the preaching. One area about our
consciousness the article did not cover in this two brained world is the left
brain/right brain controversy. I was
going to supply link but you would be better to Google it up for the latest in such
exotic topics as lateralization of brain function or functional specialization,
and that is just Wikipedia. It all has to
do with that Y chromosome. The
chromosome that contains the genes that makes a male. If those genes are not present in the womb
during pregnancy, the offspring will be female.

And as part
of becoming male, the male genes in the Y chromosome rewire the right brain of
the developing male child. Supposedly
(theoretically?), males can visualize and turn a 3D object in their heads more
so than females. Because of this
rewiring, males can throw an object at a moving target more accurately than
females. That is why males are perceived
as the hunter in our culture.

This last
argument (theory) seems to be begging the question since in most species
hunting is done by females. Maybe the
rewiring only occurs in humans.

The flip
side of this special rewiring of the male brain and in relation to the article
in Think on our two brains is that
females are more empathic than males.
This reminds me of an old saying by Lyndon Johnson that if you can’t
walk into a room and tell who is on your side and who isn’t, you shouldn’t be
in politics. Given that females have
more brain power for empathy, they should make the better politician. Go figure.

And LBJ’s
saying doesn’t just apply to politicians.
Police detectives and reporters need that trait, also. You don’t have to watch too many of today’s
real life crime stories on TV to see this in action. A really good detective will comment that the
person they are questioning is holding something back or not. Same is true for a reporter interviewing
someone for a potential news story. If
you can’t sense whether you are getting the whole story or not, you should get
out of the news business.

What the rewiring of the right half of the brain has to do with the arguments in the Think piece, I'm not sure. Males have a brain lobe set up to be more analytical and females don't so they should be more empathic, so how this affects the sexes religious philosophy may be ever more so than the Think piece indicates.

Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Spin on the Trump Phenomenon

I’ve been
waiting to comment on the Trump Phenomenon for more returns from primaries
which are closed and only card carrying Republicans are allowed to vote. This will answer the question of whether the
Trump Phenomenon is the result of crossover Democrats, independent voters, and
infrequent voters who are fired up by Trump choosing to vote Republican in open
primaries or die heart Republicans are supporting the Trump Phenomenon.

The
pontification has it that working class Republicans have had enough of the type
of politics exemplified by Cruz and Rubio.
However, the results of the closed primaries do not fully support this
pontificate. While Trump has won some
closed primaries – Cruz has won most and came in a close second where Trump did
win. Of the 11 that have occurred so
far, Trump has won 5 -- and Surprise! Surprise! (to me) Cruz has won 6.

Cruz’s
returns tell me the old Tea Party – so far right that the center looks liberal
– is still supporting its extreme right wing politics that currently dominates
the House of Reps. And although Trump
has done well in closed primaries, there no mass flight of disillusioned rank
and file Republicans to his cause.

It’s the
open primaries that are driving the Trump Phenomenon. Some recent reports on voter turnout support
the argument that it is infrequent voters who can vote Republican in open
primaries may be a big part of the Trump bump.
Add to that Democratic crossovers and independence and that explains
where Trump is getting his numbers. This
does not bode well for Hillary. Trump
could give her a run in the general election.

Trump is
using our mass news media as though it was a paid advertiser for one of his
programs. Why buy time on TV when you
can say something outlandish and the 24-hr news program will suck it up and run
with for hours – and I do mean hours – as though that was the major news story
of the moment.

What is
going on between Saudi Arabia and Iran is way more significant that what Trump
just said. What is going on in the
Middle East – especially between those two countries – could lead to WW III. Also, let’s not forget our current unrest in
the House of Reps. They turned on Boehner,
currently will not pass a budget, and the clock is ticking on when they turn on
Ryan. But you have to dig into the back
pages of newspaper or Google it to find anything about those stories.

And Yet! The 24-hour new program run with the latest
Trump hype. And the most galling aspect
of the coverage is the latest Trump supposedly news hysteria becomes old news,
forgotten and replace by something entirely new. The NYTimes had a recent article on this
subject that nail it.

Monday, March 21, 2016

Cuba Libre Economy

Opening up
relations with Cuba continues the smartest strategy we’ve formulated for those
that believe capitalism is the best economy we’ve come with for providing the
most people with the highest standard of living. It’s not perfect but it’s the best one
yet.

And one of
the keys to making it work is peace. Our
economy is what won the Cold War.
Military confinement of the spread of Communism was key, important, and
necessary. Commies took over by
force. People didn’t have a choice, so
stopping the spread was necessary, but it was peace that won the war. From the Berlin airlift in ’48-’49 to Détente
in the late ‘70’s, peaceful accords did way more for free market economies than
the planned economies of the communist world.
No matter how many 5-year plans they came up with, they just could not
keep up.

I never
understood why those planned economies with no capitalist exploiting the
working class and removing profits did not outperform the capitalists driven free
market economies, and here is the kicker, they had absolute control. If a change was needed to increase production,
they could do it without the interference of owners, investors, or shareholders.

And yet, the
free market economies literally kick the planned economies ass. Whether you compare Russia to the U.S., East
and West Europe, the two Germanys or Berlin, China and Hong Kong and Taiwan,
the working class had a higher standard of living – even with the boom and bust
cycles of free market economies. You
could see it from space at night. The West was all lit up while the East was in the dark. You can still that effect in North and South Korea.

So!!!!
Our opening the door to Cuba on peaceful terms is the way to go.